


Who You Are in the Dark

by Seiberwing



Series: Coward's Crossroads [1]
Category: Hogan's Heroes
Genre: Blood, Everyone lives, Gen, Germany, Gestapo, Heel Face Turn, Moral Dilemmas, Nazis, Spies, World War II, change of heart, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the life of an injured prisoner literally rests in his hands, Colonel Klink is forced to confront what kind of man he really is--and what kind of man he wants to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shaking

Dogs, darkness, soldiers, people yelling, this had to be the fifth time this month his sleep had been interrupted by this foolishness. Klink really wished the prisoners would hurry up and realize they had no chance of escaping. This week’s situation was made doubly worse by a surprise Gestapo visit (again) because of underground sabotage activity in the area (again) and suspected involvement with Stalag 13 (you’d think at some point they’d give up that line of argument and realize it was only an innocent prison camp) and insisting upon chasing down the prisoners themselves in case they were arranging meetings with insurgents. Again.

If they were going to do it themselves, Klink really wanted to know why he couldn’t have just stayed in bed.

A rapid staccato of gunshots came from the dim trees. Klink hit the ground, images of Allied platoons storming through his brain, but the few words he could make out of the ensuing shouting were in German. Apparently the good guys were winning. He spit out a piece of dirt and clambered to his feet again, still hunched low in the undergrowth. If he scuttled he might be mistaken for some kind of shrub and less likely to be fired upon. 

The scuttling plan worked until Klink ran out of ground to scuttle upon. His next step landed in thin air and he tumbled forward, yelping, into an unseen ditch carved out by recent rains.

“Ow, ow…ow.” Not his night. But then when was it ever his night, if he had to be out of bed later than his own prisoners? Klink tried to stand and hit his head on a protruding tree root, which forced him down to his knees again with a muffled whimper. 

“Quiet!” hissed a voice in the darkness, so close it made Klink jump. Not two yards away a large man was hunched over a prone, still figure with his hands pressed firm against the other figure’s leg. With the moon blotted out by the trees the most Klink could make out were their shapes, barely visible against the dark earth of the ditch’s walls. His arm reflexively lifted and his thin flashlight beam revealed that the prone figure was wearing a German officer’s uniform. A rifle lay nearby, and what little he could see of the officer’s attacker was covered in black cloth.

“Be quiet!” the figure hissed again, and only now did Klink have the presence of mind to realize he was speaking English. Klink tilted his flashlight up just enough to catch a dark, familiar face squinting against the glare.

“Sergeant Kinchloe?”

“Get that flashlight off. Do it, now!”

Klink, who’d trained himself to obey anything phrased as an order no matter how flimsy his superior’s position of authority, clicked off the flashlight. “What are you doing to that man?” he asked in a strained whisper.

“I’m trying to save his life.” A soft, whimpering gasp came from the soldier underneath Kinchloe and he repositioned himself, keeping his hands in place. “One of the Gestapo hit him in the thigh with a stray shot. He’s losing a lot of blood, I think they hit an artery.”

Klink leaned closer in morbid curiosity. “You’re saving a German soldier?”

“German?” Kinchloe made a soft, disbelieving gasp, almost a laugh. “It’s Carter.”

The body underneath Kinchloe raised one hand to give him a feeble wave. “H-hi, sir,” Sergeant Carter murmured, before Kinchloe made him lie still again. 

“If I leave him to get help he’ll bleed to death. And if I stay here and nobody finds us he’ll bleed out eventually anyway.”

“Then I’ll call the Gestapo over—“

“And they’ll just finish the job. They’re not going to give medical treatment to an enemy spy if there’s another healthy one right next to him.” 

“I’ll tell them not to,” Klink insisted. That would be pointlessly sadistic, no reasonable man would—oh. Right. Gestapo.

“Since when have they ever listened to you?” Kinchloe shook his head. The tiny motion made his hands shift and Carter whimpered again, his breathing quickening. “They’ll make it fast for him and slow for me. Unless my buddies show up before yours…I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Klink licked his lips, looking to the top of the ditch and then down again to the Americans. It would be the patriotic thing to do to just let the Gestapo have them, and Kinchloe was in no state to stop him if he just yelled for help. With a real Allied agent, maybe, _maybe_ Klink would have done his duty and washed his hands of the matter. But not Carter, not the little sergeant who seemed to have a smile for everyone no matter what happened, who couldn’t possibly be guilty of more than teasing the guards now and then.

“What if you stayed with him and I went for help?” The words were rushed, spilling out before Klink could remember and regret what he was committing himself to do. Helping an enemy dodge the Gestapo net was as treacherous as it got. By all rights he should already be screaming for the guards, not offering to find the underground. What was he doing?

“In your physical condition? It’ll take you at least an hour to make it to town if you didn’t get shot or stopped by someone, and you wouldn’t even know who to contact.” Kinchloe paused and looked down to Carter. In the darkness Klink couldn’t make out his expression but he seemed to be pondering something. The shouts of the Gestapo were getting fainter but were still clear against the stillness of the night, reminding both of them of the impending danger around them.

“…damn. Klink?” Kinchloe asked, even quieter than he had been, as if trying to keep the secret even from Carter. “Can you stay with him? At a run I might just make it before you’re found, but you’d have to stay with him and keep pressure on the wound the entire time. It’s not like me to trust a Kraut but I think it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

Klink hesitated. It was treachery, it was helping the enemy, it was…Carter. It was Carter. And it was his prisoner and he had an obligation to take care of them.

“Yes,” Klink found himself saying. “Of course.” He crawled through the dirt, no doubt staining his military-crisp trousers, and crouched shoulder to shoulder with the American. Everything felt as if some outside entity was controlling him, something beyond scared little Colonel Wilhelm, and he was just along for the ride.

“W-wait. Wait.” Carter was struggling to speak again, grasping weakly at Kinchloe’s pants leg. “Kinch, wait. Don’t leave, Kinch.”

“I’m going to get Colonel Hogan, okay? You’ll be fine. All Klink is going to is hold you still and even he can manage that.” Carter kept protesting with small, breathy little repetitions of Kinchloe’s name but Kinchloe ignored him. “Put your hands over mine, and press down as soon as I move.”

 _These were new gloves,_ Klink thought resignedly. He set his hands over Kinchloe’s and winced as Kinchloe slowly eased out from under them, drawing a new whimper from Carter as the pressure was set on him again. New gloves but he wouldn’t have taken them off for a thousand marks if it meant exposing his bare skin to the gaping wound he knew was down there. 

“Kinch,” Carter begged one last time. Kinchloe rose to a crouch and touched Carter’s cheek.

“I’ll be right back. Just hang on, Andrew.” Kinchloe grabbed an exposed tree root and hoisted himself out of the ditch, Klink’s flashlight in hand. 

Klink was left by himself in the darkness with a man’s life pulsing in his hands. He listened to Carter’s pained, shallow breathing, and the sounds of rustling bushes that indicated the Gestapo were still on the prowl. What would they do if they found him? Could he claim he’d mistaken Carter for a German soldier? There was no way he could appeal to their basic human sense of mercy, the Gestapo weren’t allowed to have those.

“Kl…Klink…” Carter was struggling to talk again. Klink reflexively pressed down harder, as if to smother him into silence, and felt the young sergeant wince under his hands.

“Shh, shh,” he said softly. “It’s all right. Help’s on the way.” He had no idea what one was supposed to say to a wounded soldier, let alone one who wasn’t even on his side. Klink had fought in the Great War as a pilot and been decorated for it, but he’d never actually seen someone die in front of him. That sort of thing changed a man, he’d heard. He might be horribly emotionally scarred and have trouble forming proper relationships. He’d be unable to sleep without seeing blood on his hands or hearing screams, like the front line officers experienced. It wouldn’t be fair if he had to go through all that over someone who was supposed to be his enemy. 

And this wasn’t even a battlefield, where death was expected. Carter should have been safe and snug in the barracks, not out here in the cold woods bleeding all over an officer’s uniform. Klink shouldn’t have to be the one on top of him with his arms braced against his thigh, desperately trying to keep his life from leaking out. He hoped Kinchloe made it back in time. The last witness to a man’s passing, the final friend to bid him farewell as he went to the great parade ground in the sky, shouldn’t be his jailer. 

“Klink?” Carter said abruptly, startling the distracted colonel so badly he nearly lost his grip.

“What?” Klink hissed back.

“If I die…”

“You won’t die.” Carter needed to think positive. If you thought you’d die, it was inevitable that you would.

“But if I do die…you think I’m gonna go to heaven or the Happy Hunting Grounds? Either one’s kinda…got its benefits.”

That was right, he was part Indian. Leave it to Carter to face death by wondering exactly which afterlife his mixed heritage would slot him into. “I’m sure it will be somewhere very nice?” he offered. 

“I hope so. I’d hate to go to hell….I’m not that bad of a person…am I?” A serious contemplation of his past misdeeds seemed to be distracting Carter from the pain of his injury. Personally Klink couldn’t imagine him as anything less than an angel even if he was technically an American soldier. He was so polite, even to the guards. Not like that Englander or the cockroach Frenchman, they should take some lessons on courtesy. Why couldn’t it be them down here? For LeBeau he wasn’t even sure he’d have stayed behind…no, wait, he’d forgotten the crepes. Of course he’d stay.

“One thing. One thing I want to say,” Carter said, with as much feeble force as he could manage. His hand wobbled up and fastened itself around Klink’s wrist.

Was he about to give Klink his last request? Klink didn’t feel like he deserved that heavy a responsibility. “Yes, Carter?” he said, faking a smile that the young sergeant probably couldn’t see, and leaning closer to hear his final words. Perhaps there was a girl back home he’d never kissed farewell, or some heirloom he wanted to pass on to his family, or even just a few words of thanks to Klink for being the best kommandant a POW could hope for.

“Your violin playing…” Carter took a deep, heavy breath and managed to finish the sentence. “It’s horrible. You should stop. Nobody wants to tell you, but it’s real bad. I thought you oughtta know.”

Obviously blood loss was making him delirious. “Of course, Carter, of course,” he soothed. Let him believe what he wanted, if it made him comfortable. “If you live, I swear I’ll never play it again.” Inspiration struck. “And if you die, I’ll play it at your funeral,” he said, slightly firmer. 

“Well. That’s…something to live for. I’d want a funeral…where people actually showed up.” Carter went silent again, exhausted by the effort of criticizing Klink’s musical ability, and Klink strained to hear his breathing before he let himself relax again. Was it softer than it had been before? He couldn’t see what his hands were doing, blood might be pouring over them and he’d never know. 

It wasn’t healthy for Carter to talk in his state, but Klink desperately wished he’d try anyway. The silence was far worse. Time seemed to slow down and spiral on itself, and his only chronometer was the slow lowering of Carter’s chest and the terrifying still tension before he breathed in again.

Leaves crunched on the ground above the ditch. Klink flinched and readied his excuses. Start with a nice lambasting of the Gestapo for shooting a German officer, react with shock upon finding out that he’d actually been helping an Allied prisoner, deny all connection to the incident, and then…sit by calmly while they murdered him.

“He’s down here.”

Oh thank god. It was English.

“Is he…” Hogan’s voice.

“He’s here,” Klink called back in a half-whisper. “But I think he’s getting weaker.”

“Right.” Two thuds on the other side of the ditch. Klink didn’t have time to even look up before someone’s hands covered his fingers and he was roughly shoved away. 

“You couldn’t even bandage it?” Hogan snapped, presumably to Kinchloe.

“I was short on time!” 

There had to be some limit on the number of times a man could have a faceful of dirt in one night. Klink spat out a fragment of leaf and felt around in the dark for his hat. No, let’s not have any respect for the noble commandant risking his life to protect one of his prisoners due to his strong sense of honor; let’s just toss him aside like a used plaster. 

“Can’t believe you left one of your people with a man like that. I’m surprised he didn’t call the Gestapo the moment you left.” The third voice was definitely from a German, and vaguely familiar, but Klink couldn’t quite place it. He didn’t seem to like Klink either. 

By the time Klink finally found his hat and got it to stay in his slick fingers, the three shadows had bandaged Carter up and lifted him up out of the ditch, constantly murmuring that it would be all right and that Carter should stay as quiet as possible. Klink hovered around the edges and offered lifting advice, which was met with a completely undeserved order to shut his mouth and keep it that way until the war was over.

“You’re going to take me with you, right?” he whined plaintively, looking up as they climbed out. The pause before they answered was not comforting at all.

“Must we?” French accent. LeBeau. Klink would bet that Newkirk was somewhere up there too.

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Kinchloe pointed out. A pair of hands reached down to Klink and grabbed him by the forearm, hoisting him up as his feet kicked debris away from the ditch wall.

“Blimey, he’s heavy…” And that rounded out the fivesome. The little gang was practically inseparable when it came to troublemaking, where one made a fuss the other four were probably behind it too.

Newkirk clung to Klink’s arm and rushed him through the woods the moment Klink’s feet hit the ground, following the crunching of the other men’s footsteps. The tree branches seemed to be purposefully targeting Klink’s face for attack, and several times he was knocked back by a leafy blow only to have Newkirk grab him by the coat and pull him forward to be smacked in the face a second time.

“We were this close to the road this whole time?” Klink whispered as they broke from the trees, to the flashlight-lit sight of a black van parked with its back to the woods.

“Mhm. Get in.”

The smell from the van hit him even before Newkirk shoved him inside and pulled the door shut behind them. It reeked of wet dog fur and dog food, and more foul dog-related substances. Klink huddled against the door as the car shuddered to a start and accelerated with a squeal of old tires. He held on for dear life to the door handle as the car twisted and swerved down the road to an unknown destination.

“Drive carefully!” Hogan banged on the wall separating them from the driver’s seat. “You’re jostling the patient!”

“I can do careful or I can do fast. Pick one!” the driver yelled back, and Klink finally connected voice with smell to come up with the mystery man’s identity. It was Herr Schnitzer, the guard dog trainer who never had a kind word for anyone. How had the prisoners managed to convince him to help them?

This really wasn’t right, Klink thought. He shouldn’t be shoved around by his own prisoners. But he had no orders to give, no clue what to make everyone do…no clue what was even going on. Nobody paid attention to any of his feeble questions and he wound up huddled in silence with his hat crushed and mangled in his nervous hand. It was even darker in the van than it was out in the woods. The small windows let in barely any light, even when the scenery turned from trees to street lamps, and the rumble of the engine covered the sound of Carter’s breathing no matter how much Klink strained to hear it.

He’d spent all that time worrying over Carter and keeping him alive until the cavalry arrived, it wouldn’t be fair if he died so close to safety.

A flash of light from a passing car illuminated the van, giving Klink a brief glimpse at the men across from him. LeBeau was sitting on the floor with his eyes closed, gripping Carter’s hand tightly. Hogan was crouched beside him, looking down at Carter with an almost fatherly concern. Both men were also in Luftwaffe uniforms, though LeBeau’s was a size too big for him. Hogan’s head flicked up as the light crossed his face, and their eyes met a moment before darkness fell across the van again. Klink couldn’t read his expression.

“Almost there,” Schnitzer called out. 

“Right. Newkirk, Schnizter, you carry him. Kinchloe and LeBeau, you stay in the van and Schnitzer will get you back to camp, we need someone to run damage control back there and you two are the least German. No offense, Kinch.”

“None taken. And Klink?”

“Stays with us. We might need the backup.” Apparently Klink wasn’t going to get an opinion on that either. At this point it was almost comforting to have the reins of the situation taken away from him. He hardly trusted Hogan but the American knew what to do more fully than Klink and that relieved Klink of any further responsibility for Carter’s life. Following orders was at least something he was good at.

“You’re Corporal Hans Fuhrmann. Hans,” Hogan said as Newkirk helped him lift the injured sergeant again, tenderness and urgency mingling in his voice. “Don’t forget, you’re German. Der Deutsche.”

“Deutsche, Deutsche,” Carter repeated dazedly. “Ja.”

“Gut.”

Klink followed obediently behind his prisoners as they carried Carter through the open hospital doors. “Just let me do the talking,” he said. The costumes were nice but they could never pass for real Germans, let alone officers.

“No, you let _me_ do the talking,” Hogan snapped back. “Just back me up on whatever I say.” They were through the door now, it was far too late. Klink would need to come up with some explanation for a Luftwaffe officer’s American accent and broken German--

“Achtung! What are all of you doing, lazing around like this?” Hogan’s firm hand slammed on the reception desk. “We’ve got an officer injured! I don’t care what you’re doing, drop it and get out here. Faster, faster!” The disguise was flawless. If Klink had his eyes closed he wouldn’t have been able to tell it was even the same person as his laid-back Yankee prisoner. Attendants and nurses poured out, eager to please the uniformed order-barking man as fast as possible. 

Carter was immediately lifted onto a gurney and Klink caught him murmuring, “It hurts a lot. Can you be gentle? They worked really hard on that bandage.” The younger soldier’s accent was shakier, though that could easily be attributed to pain, but his German was as flawless as Hogan’s. When had the prisoners had time to learn their captors’ language and to do it so convincingly, to boot?

Hogan kept waving his hands and barking commands, even as Carter disappeared through the hospital doors. “His name is Corporal Hans Fuhrmann. He was accidentally shot by another soldier, that matter’s been handled, just make sure he keeps that leg. Don’t worry if he wakes up speaking English, he spent a few years in America as a child and sometimes he reverts to it in moments of stress.”

“And give him the best treatment possible,” Klink interrupted, desperate to at least put a few good words in for Carter. This was backing him up, right? “Don’t spare any expense! He’s a good soldier.”

“A credit to his country,” Hogan re-interrupted, trying to wrestle back control of the conversation.

“And he’s one of mine,” Klink finished. Not one of his soldiers but…one of his, all the same.

The attendant looked from Hogan to Klink, trying to figure out who the superior officer was in this situation, and settled on the one who’d gotten in the final word. “Of course, sir. We’ll give him the greatest of care.” His gaze wandered down to Klink’s hands and he winced. “Would you like me to take care of your gloves, Herr Colonel?” he asked, disgust obvious on his face.

“Why, what’s wrong with my…” Klink reflexively looked down at his hands for the first time since he’d come in out of the night. In the van it had been hard to see and in the hospital he had been too frantic to notice that his gloves were coated with thick, congealing, crimson liquid. From the fingertips to the skin of his wrists, Klink was covered in blood.


	2. Waking

When Klink came to, he was propped up in one of the waiting room chairs. His gloves were gone, as was his hat. Someone had cleaned the bloodstains from his wrist. Hogan was up at the front desk talking to some white-coated doctor and Newkirk was dozing in a chair beside him.

“Did I faint?” Klink asked quietly.

Newkirk’s eyelids fluttered up. “Hm? Yeah. Dead away,” he grunted, still-half asleep. German words, German accent. Flawless. Impossible.

“Oh.” Klink rubbed one eye socket with the heel of his hand and tried to rouse himself further. What time was it? He wasn’t sure how long he’d spent out in the woods with Carter, it had felt like hours.

Hogan returned and both men looked up at him with wary hope. “He’ll pull through,” he said with a faint smile. “The bullet missed his renal artery—that’s the artery in his thigh, the most important. He lost a lot of blood but he should be able to at least stand up within the week. There might be a limp depending on how the wound heals and how much rest he gets, but he’ll walk again. Our boy’s a lucky man.”

“Lucky would be not getting shot in the first place,” Newkirk commented, though he was grinning.

“Thank god.” Klink ran a hand over his face and thinning hair, then paused mid-motion. “What happened to my hat and gloves?” 

“They were…stained,” Hogan said carefully, as if the mere mention of blood would send Klink into another swooning fit. “The orderly had to throw them out.”

“But my hat?” 

“You were wringing it in your hands the entire time. Hope you don’t mind, but we didn’t think you’d want them back.”

“No, it’s fine. I never liked that hat anyway. It gives me an excuse to get a new one.” Klink sat back and plucked his monocle from his eye, compulsively rubbing it with the hem of his shirt. “Why are we still speaking in Ge—“

“There’s a lot of things we can’t talk about here,” Hogan cut in. “This is a public hospital. That’s why we’re talking…like this. When we’re back at camp, I’ll explain.”

Klink replaced his monocle and pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’re going to explain everything to me,” he said sternly, trying to reclaim his authority. “You weren’t supposed to be out there, you shouldn’t be dressed like that, and since when are you able to talk…like that? This is impossible!” He threw his hands in the air, wanting to tear his hair out but knowing he had far too little to spare.

Hogan held up his hand in a pacifying gesture that just made Klink feel more upset. “Just follow us a little while longer. Once we get back to camp, you’ll get what you want. Everything.”

“Colonel?” Newkirk didn’t seem very pleased about it.

“At camp. When we have _privacy_. It’ll be easier there.” Hogan gave Newkirk a look that Klink couldn’t quite interpret, and Newkirk reluctantly nodded. The American turned his attention back to Klink. “Your staff car’s going to arrive soon. Carter should be fine here, he’s got all the necessary papers if anyone asks questions.”

Stolen, no doubt, or forged by that deviant Englishman. “Do I want to know how you got my staff car up here without my explicit order?”

“I’ll add it to the explanation pile.”

“All right.”

Klink sank down into his seat, wrapping himself tighter in his coat. He felt numb inside, a fruit with all the juice squeezed out. Sleep deprivation and stress had turned him into a complete zombie that mindlessly shuffled after his masters when the car arrived. As he got into his seat he noticed LeBeau was in the driver’s seat, still wearing the oversized Luftwaffe uniform. Klink wasn’t even going to ask.

“Clothes are in the back, mon colonel.”

“Thanks,” said Hogan. “A little privacy, kommandant?” Klink obligingly turned his face to the window so he could get changed. “When the staff car gets back to camp, you get out on the office side and we’ll slip off to the barracks. Do morning roll call and everything else like normal. Afterward, go in your office and wait fifteen minutes, then come to Barracks Two.” Hogan paused. “If that’s what you really want.”  
Klink turned back around. It was strange having Hogan back in his leather flight jacket and pilot hat and hearing him speak American English again, like seeing Hyde turn back into Jekyll. “Why wouldn’t I want to? I told you, I want to know everything about your little operation.”

“Some people at camp make a pretty good living off staying in the dark. It’s safer that way.”

“I know nothing, nothing?” he asked, rolling his eyes. 

Hogan chuckled. “Among others. People like Schultz know they’re safest when they’re ignorant. Plausible deniability, it’s the easiest option.”

Normally Klink would choose the hide-saving option ninety-nine times out of a hundred and stay in the dark. But after all he’d been through that night, the exhaustion, the danger, the blood, they owed him for what they’d put him through. He was too angry to be sensible.

“Fifteen minutes. And then I want answers.”

Morning role call was a man short, of course. Schultz wavered and shifted as he nervously began his report, and Hogan was quick to hop in and claim that Carter was too sick to get out of bed, before giving Klink a pointed ‘agree with me’ look. Klink allowed it without ordering an inspection to check, much to Schultz’s surprise, and went to hide in his office.

He sat down and pulled over the nearest pile of accounting forms. After a few moments of trying to hold himself together, his forehead hit the desk. It was just…too much. Too much everything. And he was so damn tired.

As much as he’d insisted that he be enlightened as soon as possible, Klink wanted to put it off for another twelve hours. The previous morning seemed very, very far away. Klink lifted his head a half-inch and let it hit the desk again. Whatever explanation they had, it had better be a damn good one for everything he’d been put through.

The fifteen minutes passed and Klink lingered in his office. He took up his riding crop and shrugged on his coat, spending a few moments looking for his hat before remembering that it had gone on to a better place. For the cost of his hat alone, he deserved that explanation. He wandered out into the dark prison yard, coat held tightly against him, and saw Hogan was waiting at the Barracks 2 door. When Klink approached he turned around and entered, letting his kommandant follow behind him. 

The usually lively barracks were silent and the intense gazes trained on him made him cringe. The four troublemakers were standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the room with their arms folded. “Last chance, Klink,” Hogan said as he set a hand to one of the bunks. “If you want to close your eyes and go back to the way things were, walk out now.”

“It’d be the easiest thing all around,” Kinchloe put in. 

“No.” Klink had meant to sound firm and commanding, but instead his voice was shaking. The intense solemnity of the prisoners just made his anxiety worse. He’d expected a tunnel, some stolen uniforms, and a couple of German phrasebooks. What had they been doing to make them all so eager to warn him off? 

“Fine,” said Hogan with a resigned sigh. “You asked for it.” Klink began to pull up a chair, ready to listen to Hogan unfold his fantastical story, but instead Hogan gave the bunk bed a hard slap. As Klink stood gaping, the bottom bunk rolled upwards on a barely seen pulley system, while the frame underneath swung down until a deep hole in the floor. Hogan swung over and stood on the slats, now an obvious ladder to a tunnel below. “Come on down, kommandant.”

Klink shakily followed Hogan down the ladder. Below the surface was a system of tunnels high and wide enough to walk through comfortably, nothing like the narrow crawl spaces the guards found during occasional inspections. The walls were supported by wooden beams and wires were strung across the ceiling, presumably to power the electric lamps illuminating this portion of the tunnels. He couldn’t tell how far the other paths went, but they were far enough that he couldn’t see the end of the passages that were left unlit. Klink wandered, as wide-eyed as a child, until he nearly tripped over a complex radio setup and fell back into a few open crates of canned food. 

“You…you didn’t do all of this yourselves, did you?” he stammered to Hogan as the other three came down the ladder.

“Not completely. There was a mine here about seventy-five years ago. One of our agents had it secretly reinforced, then destroyed the entrance and erased all records of the mine before he had the proposed Stalag 13 site relocated to be right on top of the tunnels.”

“Of course we spruced it up a bit,” Newkirk said with a hint of smugness. “It helps to have actual shovels rather than spoons.”

Klink pressed his hands to his head. “Then this was planned? But why?” It seemed immensely complicated, when they could easily escape through the tunnels on their own.

“The basic idea was to provide a way station for escaping allied prisoners in the one place nobody would look for escapees, as well as for passing information on to the underground.” Hogan had that frustrating American smugness in his voice. “Of course we’ve expanded since then…espionage, sabotage, whatever needs to get done. We’re sort of a jack of all trades organization.”

So there really was an underground cell in the area, Right under his nose, under his very feet and far more expansive than even Hochstetter had dreamed. “But you didn’t count on me!” he pointed out, desperately grasping at straws, grinning in triumph before he saw Newkirk struggling not to laugh. 

“You were part of the plan, Klink,” Hogan said, hands in his pockets in that cocky way he did when he’d gotten one over on the ‘Krauts’. “Our agent hunted down the officer with the lowest efficiency rating in the entire Luftwaffe and made sure he was selected. The real reason you’ve never had an escape or been transferred to another post is that we had to make sure you stayed in command. Guess you could call us your guardian angels.”

Klink didn’t feel very blessed. Stalag 13 was the one thing he’d actually done right in his life and now Hogan was saying that he’d actually been handpicked for his incompetence. His pride and joy had just been a cover for an Allied cell. 

“I know this is probably a lot to take in.”

Hogan’s hand settled on his shoulder. It was usually a comforting gesture that meant Hogan was about to pull him out of trouble with some mad scheme or compliment his talents. Klink had always taken a bit of comfort in the fact that he’d been able to earn the cocky American’s respect even as his captor. They played chess together, shared drinks, and Hogan was always ready to share a little of his Yankee ingenuity at winning over (or rebuffing) the opposite sex.

And every word of praise, every kind compliment, had just been part of a master plan to manipulate him for enemy purposes. He shrugged Hogan’s hand away in disgust.

“You think so?” Klink snapped. 

“But now you’re here and you need to make a decision. If you want to give up your position we can send you on to England to wait out the war. We’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

Leave Germany? Desert? Impossible. He’d been enough of a traitor already. Klink shook his head. “What’s my other option?”

Hogan set the hand on his shoulder again. “Work with us,” he murmured. It was that tone he used when he needed to convince Klink that something was very, very important and the best course of action was to follow along with Hogan’s plan. “Be part of the underground, help us fight Hitler and his goons. You have access to things even we can’t manage, and the operation would go so much smoother with you on our side. You’d be indispensable.”

“You want me to betray my country?” Klink said, aghast. Doubly impossible. He was nothing if not loyal, he had a chestful of medals that pronounced it.

“We want you to help your country. Hitler’s made a mess of the place, to put it mildly. A lot of Germans want him out too.”

“I could…what if I just reported you?” Klink regretted the words as soon as he said them. The prisoners’ glares were harsh enough to set an entire forest on fire. They looked ready to rip him apart for merely having the idea and LeBeau took a half-step towards Klink before Hogan’s arm stopped him.

“I have a duty to protect my men,.” Hogan’s voice was firm again, as hard and sharp as steel.

“O-of course, I understand, I wouldn’t ever dream of doing that, I was just about to say that it was a possibility but I would never ever do such a thing.” Klink backpedaled faster than a circus clown on a unicycle, hands up. Those looks…how had he missed the wolves hiding in sheep’s clothing in his camp? They could easily kill him here and his men would never find his body.

“And you’d go down for it too,” said Kinchloe. “They’re going to want to know how we kept this running so long in your prison camp.”

And ‘complete and utter incompetence’ wasn’t going to be a good enough excuse. Klink hung his head again. “I couldn’t…I don’t…” He pressed his head tightly between his palms, as if trying to hold his sanity in before it ran away entirely. “Can’t I just pretend I never saw anything?”

Hogan shook his head, looking regretful. Almost sympathetic, though Klink knew that no true sympathy lay in his lying snake’s heart. “We told you. You’re down the rabbit hole now…or the tunnel, I guess. You can’t go back to how things were.”

[space]

Dawn was breaking over the camp when Klink emerged from the barracks. The guards were walking their beats, slow and steady like wind-up toys. He saw Schultz leaning against the mess hall and wondered how the fat guard lived with himself, knowing that his job was meaningless and he was just a pawn in some larger game. Then again Schultz had never cared much for party allegiances. It must be easier for him to let himself be controlled with bribes and threats. Klink went back to his quarters and poured himself a glass of brandy. He stretched out on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, utterly exhausted but certain that he’d be unable to sleep with that horrible revelation buzzing around in his head.

He was unconscious before he could drink the brandy and didn’t wake up again until mid-afternoon. In the dim haze of half-sleep he wondered if the previous day had been a feverish dream, and he was going to wake up to be the toughest kommandant in all of Germany again. No such luck.

Klink sat up and reluctantly picked at the lunch Helga had left for him. Hogan had promised to let him mull the decision over but wanted an answer by nightly roll call. He didn’t have to wonder what would happen if he withheld, he’d seen the looks in their eyes. They could have killed him back in the woods and kept their secret safe. They could still do so now.

Klink paced, and nibbled his extremely unappetizing sandwich, and eventually found himself in his office contemplating the phone. There had to be a third option. Was there a friend in a high place who could help him out of this mess? Was there a friend in any place who could help him?

“Fraulein Helga, get me…” He paused, unsure with his knuckles pressed to his lips. God help him, he couldn’t think of any. Klink wouldn’t find out until later how many tense, concerned men were huddled around the telephone line down in the tunnels, waiting to find out if their cover was going to be blown by a loyal-unto-death officer.

“The hospital.” 

As it turned out there were several hospitals in the area, and since Klink hadn’t bothered to note the name in the midst of the chaos Helga had to call around to all of them. It didn’t help that Klink kept slipping up on the pseudonym.

“No Sergeant Fuhrmann, but we do have a _Corporal_ Fuhrman.”

“Oh, of course. I was just confused, he’s up for a promotion, you see. But don’t tell him, it hasn’t been decided yet.”

“Of course. Would you like me to see how he’s doing?”

“Yes, please.”

Klink stood around and tapped his foot while the orderly put him on hold. She came back a few minutes later to report, “He’s sleeping right now. Would you like me to wake him up?”

“No, no, that’s fine. Let him rest, he’s had a hard night.”

“He was awake earlier. The nurse says he was very cheerful for a man with a bullet through his thigh.”

“That sounds just like good old Hansy,” Klink said, putting on false cheer to hide his intense relief. “Always so happy even in the worst circumstances. He’s always been the moral support of his unit.”

“And very popular, too. You’re the second caller he’s had today.”

“Who was the other one?”

“A General Kinchmeyer.”

Kinchmeyer? Who was…oh. Ohhhhh. That was just not even trying. Klink thanked the orderly and hung up, sitting down at his desk to look over his growing mountains of paperwork. If he decided to flee Germany there would be no reason for him to put in the effort to whittle it down. The next poor sap who wound up with his job would deal with it. Klink gathered it together and started doing it anyway, trying to find some small comfort in sums and categories the way he often did. 

Several hours later he’d balanced the camp budget but found no peace of mind. Hogan was right, it was impossible for things to go back to being the way they were with the image of that massive tunnel complex burned into his mind. The paperwork was pointless. He was pointless. All his meticulous little calculations meant nothing when Hogan was probably checking his work just to make sure he was doing everything according to plan. It would have been so much easier if he’d just let himself stay in the dark.

Klink pushed himself to his feet and wandered back to his living quarters, strolling aimlessly until he wound up back on the couch. His riding crop, his futile little symbol of power, dangled loosely from his fingers. He should probably leave it behind when he fled the country, he’d want to look as unGerman as possible to avoid offending the Allied soldiers. Hogan had promised him he’d be safe but he couldn’t imagine he’d be treated kindly. His only claim to generosity was the fact that he’d never directly ordered a prisoner shot.

The stove creaked. Klink watched with an almost idle curiosity as it swung around in a half circle, exposing a hidden tunnel in the floor. LeBeau’s head popped out of the hole, followed quickly by his arms and torso. He leaned on the floorboards, looking almost like a little gopher in a red hat and jacket and gave Klink a contemplative stare.

Klink pointed at the tunnel. “Has that always been there?” He’d run out of energy to be surprised with.

“Non. We installed it during your last trip to Paris.” 

How many damned tunnels were in this camp? It seemed a miracle the place didn’t sink into the ground. Klink folded his arms, his riding crop resting in his lap. “So what do you want?”

LeBeau made a small shrug. He was acting as if this was a social call and he’d come in through the door instead of the floor. “I wanted to see if you’d made your decision yet.”

“I haven’t.” Klink shifted on the couch, rolling his crop between his hands. “Why did you even let me down there? You could have just made something up.” Like they always did. He was a fool to go down that ladder.

“We thought about it. Some of us wanted to keep up the act. And some of us thought you deserved something better for what you did for Andrew. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.”

Klink shook his head, aching inside. So they had respected him enough to destroy his life as he knew it, that was a respect he could do without. “How can I possibly choose between desertion and treachery? I’m a loyal German.”

LeBeau snorted in derision. “I’ve been here long enough to see what side you’re really on. It’s the side you’ve always been on.”

“Yes, the side of—”

“Your own side.” LeBeau pointed at him accusingly. “Not your country, you. You’ve never wanted to do anything but protect your own bosche skin.”

Bosche—pig. “You’re really not convincing me to be sympathetic to your cause,” Klink pointed out, trying to hide how much the accusation hurt. “So I’m a coward. So what? I’m alive, aren’t I? I’m not in Russia.”

“Last night, you stayed with Andrew even though it put you in danger with no possible gain for yourself.” LeBeau rested his elbows on the floorboards. “How did that feel?”

“It…felt…” It had been terrifying. He hadn’t been able to think about anything but the moment, just keeping Carter alive for a few moments longer until help arrived. It was instinct. Klink offered a helpless shrug. “I don’t know how it felt. I just did it. I’m not sure I was even thinking about it.” Perhaps if he had he wouldn’t be in this mess. His fingers tensed around the crop.

Superior, that was the word for how LeBeau was looking at him, that was why it felt so unpleasant. It was the way Klink looked at his prisoners and Burkhalter looked at Klink. “Tell me something,” LeBeau said, thumb flicking over his chin. “Would Major Hochstetter have saved Carter’s life?” 

“Of course not.”

“General Burkhalter?”

“No.”

“Hitler?”

Klink hesitated, wary of saying anything negative about his beloved Fuehrer, but finally had to admit he wouldn’t.

LeBeau nodded triumphantly. “They’d all have left him to die. Why did you save him?”

“Because I…well…” It was something he’d been trying not to ask himself ever since he’d been left alone in the woods. Klink stuttered and struggled with his response before he finally had to conclude, “I just thought I needed to do it. He’s my prisoner, he’s my responsibility.”

“I don’t think many kommandants see it that way.” LeBeau stood up straight again. Klink was used to the Frenchman outright hating him over that whole invading his country business but this felt almost like pity. “You’ve been a coward your entire life. Last night you saved an Allied prisoner because it was the right thing to do, and never mind the consequences. If you work with us you have a chance to do it again and make up for an entire lifetime of cowardice. Or…” 

LeBeau shrugged. “You can write this off as temporary insanity and go back to making your own life your first priority. You know what’s happening in Germany is wrong and you know what a pack of monsters is running the place. Are you going to just keep sitting back and taking it?”

Just the thought was making Klink’s hands tremble. “And what if you fail? What if you lose the war anyway?” He’d been a failure his whole life, he couldn’t even run a prison camp without the prisoners taking it over. He would probably be a horrible spy too. 

“Then we failed doing the right thing. To me, that’s all that matters.” LeBeau lifted his chin and puffed out his chest, the perfect picture of French pride. It occurred to Klink that he had no idea what LeBeau had done before the war. Perhaps he, too, had sat back at a cushy desk job and let things pass by until his country crumbled before the German war machine. 

There was a knock on the door, probably Helga with his dinner. Klink yelped that he’d be there in a minute. LeBeau scurried back down the tunnel and pulled the stove back over the hole.

“LeBeau!” Klink called out softly.

The stove creaked back a few inches. “What?” said the little crack in the floor.

“I’ll…I’ll think about it, all right?”

“Right. Bonsoir, Colonel Klink.” The stove slid closed again. Klink let out a huge breath and fell back, knocking his head on the table that hadn’t been that close to the sofa arm five minutes ago. As he rubbed his dented head he pondered LeBeau’s question again. Saving Carter hadn’t felt good, or brave, but it certainly hadn’t felt shameful.

He was very, very sick of feeling shameful.

***

Crossing the length of the prison yard for evening role call felt as solemn as walking to his own execution. Klink’s knuckles were white around his riding crop but he kept his head held up. His bones seemed to turn to iron, as if there was a determination and strength inside him he hadn’t felt since the first World War. 

By now the word must have spread, every prisoner in the camp was staring intently at him as they stood at attention in their neat little rows. Of course they’d spent their entire captivity watching him, manipulating him, using him, but this was the first chance they’d given him to decide his own destiny. Even Schultz seemed to notice the tension in the air, and Klink brushed off the sergeant’s tentative inquiry into his health. He looked nobody in the eyes and focused on the feel of the crop’s grip under his bare, frigid hands and the little gap in the ranks made by Carter’s disappearance.

Hogan waited for him at the Barracks 2 door as the prisoners dispersed back to their huts. He let Klink first and shut the door behind him, making the little building feel like a cage.

“Well, Klink?”

Klink closed his eyes. This was foolishness, absolute foolishness. But that horrible feeling of being nothing but a failure and a pawn had faded, and it was only in its passing that he realized how much of his life had been spent cowering. He could stand up again.

His eyes opened and a tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. 

“When do I start?”


End file.
